The Stranger's Child (63 page)

‘I live in Tooting Graveney.’

‘Oh, yes . . . Is that near Oxford?’

‘Not really, no . . . It’s near Streatham.’

‘Streatham, oh!’ – even this seemed rather a lark.

They now shook hands. ‘Well, thank you so much.’ It was perhaps a moment to call her Daphne, but he held off till their second session. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, same time.’

Paul wondered afterwards if it was a true misunderstanding or a bit of Dudleyesque fooling. She halted by the door into the hall, head cocked in confusion. ‘Oh, are you coming back?’ she said.

‘Oh . . . well’ – Paul gasped. ‘I think that was . . . what we agreed!’ He’d got nothing out of her today, but was resignedly treating it as a warm-up for the real explorations the following afternoon.

‘What are we doing tomorrow, Wilfrid?’

‘I should be surprised if we were doing anything very much,’ said Wilfrid, in a way that made Paul wonder whether all his patient simplicities weren’t perhaps a very cool kind of sarcasm.

In the Renault it was rather as if a child drove an adult, both of them pretending that it wasn’t worrying or surprising. It emerged that the dip-switch was broken, so that they had either to crawl along on side-lights, the hedges looming dimly above them, or to be flashed at by on-coming motorists blinded by the headlights on full beam. Wilfrid coped with both things with his usual whimsical patience. Paul didn’t want to distract him, but when they got on to the main road he said, ‘I hope I’m not tiring your mother.’

‘I think she’s enjoying it,’ Wilfrid said; and with a glance in the mirror, as if to check she wasn’t there, ‘She likes telling a story.’

Paul very much wished she would tell him a story. He said, ‘I’m afraid it was all so long ago.’

‘There are things she won’t talk about . . . I hope we can trust you on that,’ said Wilfrid, with an unexpected note of solidarity after his earlier grumbling about her.

‘Well . . .’ – Paul was torn between the discretion just requested of him and the wish to ask Wilfrid what he was talking about. ‘I obviously don’t want to say anything that would upset her – or any of the family.’ Might Wilfrid himself tell him things? Paul had no idea what he was capable of, mentally. He clearly loved his mother and more or less hated his father, but he might not be the ally Paul needed for his further prying into the dealings of the Sawles and Valances. If Corinna was really Cecil’s daughter, then Dudley’s shocking coolness towards her might have some deeper cause.

‘I don’t think you’re married, are you?’ Wilfrid asked, peering forward over the wheel into the muddled glare on the edge of Worcester.

‘No, I’m not . . .’

‘No, Mother thought not.’

‘Ah, yes . . . well, hmm.’

‘Poor old Worcester,’ said Wilfrid a minute later, as the car swerved through a sort of urban motorway right next to the Cathedral; up above, too close to see properly, reared floodlit masonry, the great Gothic tower. ‘How could they have butchered the old place like this?’ Paul heard this as a catch-phrase, saw mother and son on their trips into town coming out with it each time. ‘Right next to the Cathedral,’ said Wilfrid, craning out to encourage Paul to do the same, while the car wandered over into the fast lane – there was a massive blast on a horn, a lit truck as tall as the tower screeching behind them, then thundering past.

Turning left, and then passing staunchly through a No Entry sign, they travelled the length of a one-way street in the wrong direction, Wilfrid mildly offended by the rudeness of on-coming drivers, turned another corner, and there they were outside the front door of the Feathers. ‘Amazing,’ said Paul.

‘I know this old town backwards,’ said Wilfrid.

‘Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,’ said Paul, opening the door.

‘Shall I pick you up?’ said Wilfrid, with just a hint of breathlessness, Paul thought, a glimpse of excitement at having this visitor in their lives. But Paul insisted he was perfectly happy to get a Cathedral. He stood and watched as Wilfrid drove off into the night.

Daphne followed her regime as usual that evening – there was the hot milk, and then the tiny glass of cherry brandy, to take the sickening sleepy taste away. Her sleeping pill itself was swallowed with the last cooled inch of the milk, and after that a pleasant certainty that the day was wound up suffused her, well before the physical surrender to temazepam. Tonight the cherry brandy seemed to celebrate the fact. She said, ‘What time is he coming back?’ just to have it confirmed that it wasn’t till after lunch. Wilfrid started on the film that followed the News, but her macular thing made the telly both boring and upsetting. So she left him to it, going out of the room with a passing pat at his arm or shoulder, and made her way to the other end (in so far as Olga had another end) of the house.

Book at Bedtime
this week was the autobiography of a woman – she couldn’t remember her name, or what exactly she’d been up to in Kenya last night when sleep had come with just enough warning for her to switch off the radio and the bedside light. On the dressing-table, an awful cheap white and gilt thing, stood the photographs she never really looked at, but she peered at them now, in her sidelong way, as she smeared on her face cream. Their interest seemed enhanced after the visit from the young man, and she was glad he hadn’t seen them. The one of her with Corinna and Wilfrid by the fishpond at Corley was her favourite – so small but clear: she turned it to the light with a creamy thumb. Who had taken it, she wondered? . . . The photo, known by heart, was the proof of an occasion she couldn’t remember at all. The Beaton photo of Revel in uniform was, pleasingly, almost famous: other portraits from the same session had appeared in books, one of them in her own book, but this exact photograph, with its momentary drop of the pose, the mischievous tongue-tip on the upper lip, was hers alone. A pictorial virtue, of the kind that Revel himself had taught her to understand, had been made of the hideous great-coat. His lean head and fresh-cropped poll were framed by the upturned collar – he looked like some immensely wicked schoolboy, though she knew if you looked closely you could see the fine lines round the eyes and the mouth that Beaton had touched out in the published images.

She woke in the dark out of dreams of her own mother, very nearly a nightmare; it was wartime and she was searching for her, going in and out of shops and cafés asking if anyone had seen her. Daphne never remembered her dreams, but even so she felt sure she had never dreamt about her mother before – she was a novelty, an intruder! It was bracing, disconcerting, amusing even, once she had felt for the switch at the neck of the lamp, and squinted at the time, and had a small drink of water. Freda had died in 1940, so the Blitz setting made almost too much sense. And no doubt talking to the young man, trying to cope with all his silly and rather unpleasant questions, had brought her back. In talking, she had only touched on her mother, whose actual presence in 1913 she could no longer see at all, but that must have been enough to set the old girl going, as if greedy for more attention. Daphne kept the light on for a while longer, with a barely conscious sense that in childhood she would have done the same, longing for her mother but too proud to call for her.

In the dark again she found she was at the tipping-point, relief at the closing-down of yesterday was ebbing irrecoverably, and already the dread of tomorrow (which of course was already today) was thickening like regret around her heart. Why on earth had she said he could come back? Why had she let him come at all, after that idiotic condescending piece about her book in the
Listener
, or perhaps the
New Statesman
? He was only pretending to be a friend – something no interviewer, probably, had ever been. Paul Bryant . . . he was like some little wire-haired ratter, with his long nose and his tweed jacket and his bloody-minded way of going at things. Daphne turned over in a spasm of confused annoyance, at him and at herself. She didn’t know what was worse, the genial vague questions or the stern particular ones. He called him Cecil all the time, not as if he’d known him, exactly, but as if he could help him. ‘What was Cecil like?’ – what a stupid question . . . ‘When you say in your book he made love to you, what happened exactly?’ She’d said ‘Pass!’ to that one, rather good, as if she were on
Mastermind
. She thought tomorrow she would just say ‘Pass!’ to everything.

And Robin, too – there was a good deal of Robin this and that. She couldn’t think what he meant by sending him, recommending him; though then a shadowy understanding, grim, frivolous, almost wordless – the old thing that she didn’t even picture – turned over and after a minute lay down again at the side of her mind. As well as which, there was something else, which maybe was actually a blessing in its way, that for quite long stretches of the conversation young Paul Bryant had clearly not been listening to a word she said. He thought she couldn’t see him at all, reading something while she talked; then he hurried her along, or he came in suddenly with some completely irrelevant other thing. Maybe he thought he knew all the answers already, but in that case why ask questions? Of course he had it all on his blasted tape-recorder, but that didn’t exempt him from the normal courtesies. She thought in the morning she would ring up Robin at the office and give him a very hard time about it.

She turned over once more and settled with a spasm of self-righteousness; and was on the very edge of sleep again when the obvious idea that she could put Paul Bryant off altogether made her suddenly and beautifully alert. Wilfrid had taken him back to the Feathers, that fearful dump – she was glad he was staying there. He seemed to think it was quite the thing! Only two stars, he’d said, but very comfortable . . . She’d get her son to ring up for her first thing in the morning. She lay there, half-plotting, half-drowsing, imagining it, the afternoon without him, freedom tinged, but not irreparably spoilt, by guilt. She was pretty sure she had said he could come twice, and besides he had come from London specially. But why should she be put upon, at the age of eighty-three? She wasn’t at all well, she was having a lot of trouble with her eyes . . . She really mustn’t worry about it. He’d been through all Cecil’s letters to her, which he claimed were manipulative and self-pitying – perfectly true, perhaps, but then what more did he want from her? He was asking for memories, too young himself to know that memories were only memories of memories. It was diamond-rare to remember something fresh. And she felt that if she did, Paul Bryant was hardly the person she would want to share it with.

Daphne was supposed to have a good memory, and this reputation sustained her uneasily in face of the thousands of things she couldn’t remember. People had been amazed by what she’d dredged up for her book, but much of it, as she’d nearly admitted to Paul Bryant, was – not fiction, which one really mustn’t do about actual people, but a sort of poetical reconstruction. The fact was that all the interesting and decisive things in her adult life had happened when she was more or less tight: she had little recall of anything that occurred after about 6.45, and the blur of the evenings, for the past sixty years and more, had leaked into the days as well. Her first problem, in doing her book, had been to recall what anyone said; in fact she had made up all the conversations, based (if one was strictly truthful) on odd words the person almost certainly had said, and within about five, or at the outside ten, years of the incident recorded. Was this just her failing? Now and then people gave her the most astonishing reports of what
she
had said, drolleries they would never forget, and rather gratifying to her – though perhaps these should be treated with comparable suspicion? Sometimes she knew for sure that they were mixing her up with someone else. She had probably taken too long with her memoirs. Basil had encouraged her, told her quite freely to write all about Revel, and Dudley before him, ‘significant figures!’ he’d said, self-mockingly. But it had taken thirty years to bring it off, over which time she’d naturally forgotten a great deal that she’d known very well when she started out. If she’d kept a diary it would have been different, but she never had, and her experience as a memoirist, if typical, couldn’t help but throw the most worrying light over half the memoirs that were written. Certain of her incidents were tied indubitably to Berkshire or Chelsea, but a host of others took place against a general-purpose scenery, as in some repertory theatre, of drinks-tray and mirrors and chintz-covered sofas, blending all social life into one staggeringly extended run.

She felt something similar, but worse in a way, about hundreds and hundreds of books she’d read, novels, biographies, occasional books about music and art – she could remember nothing about them at all, so that it seemed rather pointless even to say that she had read them; such claims were a thing people set great store by but she hardly supposed they recalled any more than she did. Sometimes a book persisted as a coloured shadow at the edge of sight, as vague and unrecapturable as something seen in the rain from a passing vehicle: looked at directly it vanished altogether. Sometimes there were atmospheres, even the rudiments of a scene: a man in an office looking over Regent’s Park, rain in the streets outside – a little blurred etching of a situation she would never, could never, trace back to its source in a novel she had read some time, she thought, in the past thirty years.

She woke to find grey light spreading above the curtains, and made a wary assessment of the time. These early wakings were anxious countings of loss and gain – was it late enough not to mind being woken? Might it still be early enough to lay a presentable claim on more sleep? With the coming on of spring one was more defenceless. Five-fifty: not too bad. And as soon as she wondered about whether she had to go to the loo she found she did. Out of bed, into slippers, dressing-gown on over pyjamas – she was glad she couldn’t see herself in the mirror as more than a blurred bundle. Light on, out past Wilfrid’s door, the click of the loose parquet, but it wouldn’t wake him. He had the large capacity for sleep of a child. She had a picture, not much changed in fifty years, of his head on the pillow, and nothing ever happening to him, at least that she knew of. And now there was this Birgit, with her shadowy plans. Poor Wilfrid was so naïve that he couldn’t see the woman for the fortune-hunter she was – and what a fortune! . . . Daphne tutted as she groped her way through the shadowy cupboard in which the wash-basin and lavatory were like surreal intrusions in a mountain of rubbish.